An autonomous vehicle is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and navigating without human input. In particular, an autonomous vehicle can observe its surrounding environment using a variety of sensors and can attempt to comprehend the environment by performing various processing techniques on data collected by the sensors. Given knowledge of its surrounding environment, the autonomous vehicle can identify an appropriate motion path through such surrounding environment.
Thus, a key objective associated with an autonomous vehicle is the ability to perceive the location of objects that are proximate to the autonomous vehicle and, further, to predict or otherwise understand where such object will be in the near future (e.g., the next one to ten seconds). The ability to accurately and precisely predict the future locations of objects is fundamental to enabling the autonomous vehicle to generate an appropriate motion plan through its surrounding environment.